7 Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Motivation Massively multiuser virtual environments (MMVEs) have become an increasingly popular Internet application in the last years. They allow a large number of users to join a simulated virtual online world. There, every user is represented by an avatar. The user controls his avatar to move through the virtual world and interact with his surrounding and the avatars of other users. The most successful MMVEs are massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). In MMORPGs, users can play a role in a fantasy game world, fighting monsters together with other players, solving epic quests, advancing their characters to higher levels, and acquiring virtual wealth. World of Warcraft [16] by Blizzard Entertainment is the most prominent example, having more than ten million players worldwide as of March 2012 [92]. To play the game, users have to pay a monthly fee, allowing Blizzard Entertainment to make huge profits from operating World of Warcraft. The MMORPG market currently amounts to $12 billion in 2012 and is expected to grow to $17.5 billion per year by 2015 [115]. This market size makes creating MMORPGs interesting for game developing companies. Consequently, a lot of new MMORPGs have been announced or already entered the market. However, there are considerable economic risks involved in developing and operating an MMORPG. After the initial development, there are significant costs to operate the game. Current MMORPGs are based on client/server technology. A central server contains the whole virtual world, receiving player actions from all the clients and supplying them with updates of the world state. This server has to be powerful and it needs a high bandwidth and low latency Internet connection to support just a few thousand players. If a company wants to support more players, it has to use

8 2 Chapter 1 Introduction more servers with each server running an identical copy of the game world, called shard. Operating these servers creates considerable costs. As long as player numbers are stable and servers are working to capacity, revenues should always cover operating costs. However, player numbers may vary greatly over time and for new games it is pretty had to predict their success. If companies overestimate player numbers, they will provide too many servers with over-provisioned bandwidth resulting in higher costs and less profit or losses for the company. Underestimating the player numbers also causes problems. When World of Warcraft started, its operator was very much surprised by its success. Servers were overloaded, spoiling the game experience for players with high latency (lag) till the game reacts to player input, overcrowding of areas in game, and even regular server failure. It took the operator quite some time to keep up with the enormous success and open up new shards. At that time, competition in the market was not very intense. However, there are many more competitive games today. Bad playing experience at the start and the resulting bad reputation might ruin the success of a game forever. Users will quit and play one of the competing games. The need for high player numbers to cover costs of operation and the upfront uncertainty in player numbers form barriers for smaller companies. Without these problems, some niche games appealing to a smaller audience might become economically more successful creating a more diverse market. Peer-to-peer technology might help to solve these problems. In a peer-to-peer application, there is no central server all clients communicate with. Instead, all peers can communicate with each other, supplying services to other peers and using services other peers offer. Peer-to-peer file sharing applications have been very successful in distributing files, with peers exchanging data directly between each other. No expensive central server with large storage space to store files and high bandwidth to deliver files is necessary. The software creates the network out of participating computers, with each computer supplying storage space and bandwidth to other computers. In an ideal peer-to-peer application, every node would supply as many resources as it consumes. Thus, a peer-to-peer-based MMVE could possibly support any number of players in one single world, without the operator of the game having to pay for servers or bandwidth. However, to apply peer-to-peer technology in MMVEs, a decentralized simulation of the virtual has to be developed. Instead of using a central server, peers exchange messages directly between each other to perform that distributed simulation. Despite changing network conditions and message latencies, players

9 1.2 Contribution 3 expect the simulation to advance as fast as the real wall-clock time, with reactions to player input occurring as fast as they would occur in the real world. Furthermore, the MMVE should work reliably despite nodes joining or even failing unexpectedly. Although several approaches have been discussed, so far no working peer-to-peerbased MMVE exists. One reason for this is a serious issue threatening MMORPGs: Cheating. MMORPGs are highly competitive environments. Typically, a player advances his avatar to higher levels by fighting monsters and solving quests. He collects better equipment, which in turn enables him to fight even harder monsters and advance further. Virtual currency can be used to buy better equipment, too. Certain achievements can only be reached by investing enough time and having the necessary equipment and player skills. Thus, a player s avatar is perfectly suited to demonstrate the player s status to other players. For a lot of players, gaining achievements and advancing his avatar plays the major role in MMORPGs [128]. How the game is meant to be played is guarded by rules. They govern how players interact with the virtual world and other players and what the effects of interaction will be. These rules have to be the same for all players and they have to be obeyed by all players for the game to be considered fair. Players playing by the rules have to invest a lot of time and effort to make progress. Consequently, there will always be some players trying to break the rules to get an unfair advantage: to cheat. Since avatars, equipment, and virtual currency are even traded for real money nowadays, there will be motivation and criminal energy for cheating. Cheating poses a serious threat to all MMORPGs. For honest players, fairness is a critical requirement. If honest players think they are competing with cheaters, they will simply quit the game and look for a better one. 1.2 Contribution In current client/server-based games, enforcing rules is straight-forward. The whole game world and player interaction are centrally managed by a server able to check whether player actions conform to the rules. This server has full authority over the virtual world state and it can be trusted to stick to the rules since it is under control of the operator. In a peer-to-peer-based MMVE, the world state and its evolution is distributed between all peers. These peers cannot be trusted. An attacker could have made any kind of modification to the game program. The best one can hope

10 4 Chapter 1 Introduction for is only a certain number of nodes being cheaters and the majority being honest. Under this assumption, a system using replication and redundant checking might become a viable remedy for cheating. Our main contribution is the design and evaluation of such a system: a decentralized distributed storage able to ensure the virtual world only evolves to the rules even in the presence of a certain number of malicious nodes. This storage is based on our second contribution: the design of a self-stabilizing peer-to-peer overlay resilient to routing attacks malicious nodes could use to increase their influence on the operation of the storage. 1.3 Organization This thesis is structured as follows: Chapter two contains the foundations this thesis is based on. It illustrates how current MMVEs look like, explains their current technical infrastructure, and shows what has been done to realize peer-to-peer-based MMVEs. It also discusses the problem of cheating, introduces different types of cheating, and shows the state-of-the-art to counter cheating. Chapter three presents the basic architectural design of our approach. In chapter four, we present a selfstabilizing overlay we developed to serve as the basis of a reliable virtual world storage shown in chapter five. Extensive evaluation follows in chapter six, while chapter seven concludes, summarizing the contributions of this thesis and showing open topics.

11 Chapter 2 Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments 2.1 Characterization A massively multiuser virtual environment is a virtual world able to host a massive number of users simultaneously. Richard Bartle gave the following definition of a virtual world in his seminal book [9]: Virtual worlds are implemented by a computer (or network of computers) that simulates an environment. Some but not all the entities in this environment act under the direct control of individual people. Because several such people can affect the same environment simultaneously, the world is said to be shared or multi-user. The environment continues to exist and develop internally (at least to some degree) even when there are no people interacting with it; this means it is persistent. Multi-user dungeons (MUDs) were the first successful applications to fulfil this virtual world definition. The first MUD was developed in 1978 by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle. MUDs were completely text-based. A user could connect to a MUD server using a Telnet client. He created a player character: an entity representing the user in the virtual world. The state of the virtual world as seen by the player character was presented to the user with text descriptions. It was up to the user s imagination to create an image of the world in his mind. He could issue text commands to control the actions of his player character. He could move to different neighbouring areas, inspect the local area, or interact with other entities in the local area. These commands were sent to the MUD server. It simulated the result of the action, updated the state of the virtual world, and sent the result of the action back

12 6 Chapter 2 Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments to the user. When entering an area with another player character in it, users could interact by talking to each other or exchanging virtual items. Player characters could also interact with characters controlled by the server, so-called non-player characters (NPCs). Some of them were friendly characters players could talk to and obtain tasks to solve. Others are enemy characters players could fight. Some of these enemy characters continually moved through the virtual world to look for player characters to attack so the world kept changing even when no player characters were present. Thus, MUDs fulfil Bartle s definition of a virtual world. Bartle pointed out, that the fact that most MUDs were games allowing users to play a role in a fantasy game world heavily influenced the terminology to describe virtual worlds today. Users are players. When interacting with the virtual world they play the game controlling their player character. Although it might be possible to use virtual worlds as e-learning environment or collaborative work environment, most virtual worlds today are games. While MUDs still exist, modern virtual worlds feature a graphical representation on the client. A user can actually see an image of the virtual world and interaction takes place via a graphical user interface. The first virtual world featuring graphics was Neverwinter Nights published in It could be played over the AOL online service and existed until Meridian 59 published in 1996 was the first 3D graphical virtual world. It was also the first to be playable over the Internet. Thus, it can be regarded as the ancestor of modern 3D virtual worlds. Ultima Online published in 1997 and Everquest from 1999 closely followed and were the first to become a commercial success. They still exist today. The most successful virtual world today is World of Warcraft [16] published in 2004, attracting millions of players. According to Richard Bartle, most virtual worlds can be identified by five characteristics ensuring that a virtual world resembles the real world. Rules: "The world has underlying, automated rules that enable players to effect changes to it (although not to the rules that grant them this ability). This is the world s physics." Players can execute actions in the world that will change the world. For example, they can move their player character around changing the position of the player character in the world. The result of an action will be computed automatically according to the rules of the virtual world. These rules have been defined by the creator of the virtual world, they cannot be changed by players.

13 2.1 Characterization 7 Avatars: "Players represent individuals in the world. They may wield partial or total influence over an army, crew or party, but there is only one game entity that represents them in the world and with which they strongly identify. This is their character. All interaction with the world and other players is channeled through characters." This means a player is represented in the virtual world by his avatar or player character. Actions triggered by the player are executed by his player character. There might be additional characters influenced by the player, but his player character is the most important one. Thus, a multiplayer strategy game is not a virtual world because there is no single character representing the player giving out all the orders. Real time interaction: "Interaction with the world ta-kes place in real time. When you do something in the world, you can expect feedback almost immediately." Time in the virtual world passes like wall time in the real world. Similar to the real world, actions of characters have almost immediate effect. Furthermore, the world continues to change, even if a player character does not perform any actions. Thus, round-based games would not be a virtual world. Shared world "The world is shared." Multiple players can join the virtual world at the same time. They can interact with each other directly or indirectly via the environment. A single-player roleplaying game would not be a virtual world, as it can only be played by a single player although the first three characteristics might be fulfilled by the game. Persistence "The world is (at least to some degree) persistent." This means the world maintains its state including the effects of player actions. When a player leaves the virtual world, the changes he affected to the world will remain. When he comes back, his player character will be located at the position he left and the world will have evolved according to its rules and the actions of the remaining players. While the first graphical virtual worlds were called graphical MUDs, today the term massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) is typically used for these games. The term "massively multiplayer" suggests that a high number

14 8 Chapter 2 Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments Figure 2.1: Representation of the virtual world in World of Warcraft as seen by the player of players can simultaneously share the virtual world. With current client/serverbased MMORPGs up to a few thousand players can join a virtual world at the same time The User Perspective Similar to oﬄine computer games, a player has to obtain the game software and install it on his computer before entering the virtual world. He also has to register at the game operator to create an account. After starting the software and entering account name and password, the user can create a new player character or select one of his existing player characters to enter the virtual world. Typical for role-playing games, a player can choose class and race of his created character and customize its appearance. Most MMORPGs feature a fantasy world and race choices include dwarves, elves, and gnomes. Typical classes are warriors, mages, and priests. A class determines the play style of a character, the available equipment, and the actions that can be performed. Warriors usually wear heavy armour. When ﬁghting, they will try to get close to their target and their actions include various kinds of attacks performed with weapons like swords or axes. Mages wear only thin armour. They will try to keep their distance to the enemy and attack him with magical spells like ﬁreballs. Priests can cast spells to heal characters and are often included when players play in groups to heal injured members. A player can have multiple player characters so when joining he can choose which role he wants to play at that time.

15 2.1 Characterization 9 After joining the world, the player will see a 3D graphical representation of the virtual world. Figure 2.1 shows how this representation looks like for the currently most popular MMORPG World of Warcraft [16]. It features a third person perspective with a camera centred on the player character, zoom- and rotatable using the mouse. Player characters can move forward, backward, sideways, and rotate by pressing the associated movement keys. For example, pressing the arrow up key will cause the character to move forward and upon releasing the key the character will stop moving. Similarly, pressing the right arrow key will start rotating right and releasing it will stop the rotation. Holding up and right arrow at the same time will cause the player character to run clockwise in circles. A graphical user interface is laid over the world view providing additional elements like a map, a chat frame, frames for showing the status of the player character or of the currently targeted character, and buttons giving access to player inventory or player equipment. The map shows a top-down view of the area surrounding the player character. Using the chat frame, players can talk to other players. The character status frames shows the amount of health a character has left and the available resources for performing actions. Player Actions Action bars contain the actions that can be triggered by the player by clicking on them or by pressing the shortcut key associated with the slot in the action bar. Actions include attacks or magical spells causing a certain amount of damage to the target character reducing the health of the target. When the health reaches zero, the target dies. Player characters that died will be resurrected. Non-player characters controlled by artificial intelligence (AI) will disappear and spawn again after some time has passed. Healing classes can also cast healing spells to add life points to their own health or to the health of allied characters. To execute an action, certain preconditions have to be satisfied. Many actions need a target the action is performed on. The player has to select a target from the world using the mouse. It will appear in the target frame and all actions requiring a target will be performed on that target. When the player tries to attack the target, his player character must face the target and it must be within range of the attack. Maximum action ranges differ between actions. Melee attacks typically require being very close to the target while magical spells can be cast from longer ranges. Actions often cost some kind of resource such as mages needing mana to cast a spell. Only when enough of the resource is currently available, the action can

16 10 Chapter 2 Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments be performed subtracting the cost of the action from the available resource. Often resources regenerate over time. If the player triggers an action and the preconditions are not fulfilled, he will receive an error message. Otherwise, the action will be executed by applying effects to the world. A typical effect is causing damage to a character reducing the amount of health the character has left. The damage caused depends on attributes like strength, stamina, and intelligence of the player character as well as attributes of the receiving character like armour or damage resistances. These attributes depend on the level of the player character and its equipment. Player characters with higher level and better equipment are stronger, able to defeat stronger opponents. Actions like magical spells often have an associated cast time that must pass before the effect is applied. For example, casting a fireball may require the player character to stand still and wait for two seconds before the fireball is actually launched and flies towards the enemy causing damage on impact. Any movement of the player character while casting will interrupt the action. Enemies getting in melee range of the caster might also perform a special action interrupting the casting. Upon execution of the action, the action must typically cool down for a certain time until it may be used again. Cooldown times are different for different actions with more powerful action having longer cooldowns so they can be used less often during a fight. There is also often a global cooldown that prevents any action from being executed after a former action has been triggered. In World of Warcraft, this global cooldown lasts 1.5 seconds but can be reduced by a certain attribute of the player character. This mechanism fosters a tactical use of abilities activating the right ability at the right time instead of letting the player hitting keys fastest win. The global cooldown further decreases action frequency to limit the amount of actions the server has to process in a given time. Considering the large variety of actions of different classes that also includes healing, temporary strengthening effects for allies or weakening effects for enemies, and effects hindering or fastening movement of characters, fights feature interesting dynamic interactions. The interaction is usually not as fast-paced as in first-person shooters (FPS), but more tactical due to cooldowns and the wide variety of actions. The winner in player versus player fights (PVP) is determined by player skill as well as strength of player characters. NPCs can also perform certain actions but their AI is more predictable then a human enemies actions making defeating NPCs mostly a matter of player character level and equipment.

17 2.1 Characterization 11 How and how fast characters move, the set of available actions, their preconditions, effects, and how these effects are calculated make up a major part of the game mechanics or game rules. It is absolutely crucial these game rules cannot be broken as we will argue in the next section. Motivations of Play Fighting NPCs or other players makes up a large part of player activities but is just a means to an end. The world in role-playing games has a story players can experience. NPCs will send players on quests, asking them to defeat certain monsters in the world, to protect NPCs from enemies, or to collect certain items that are hidden and protected by monsters in a distant location. Sometimes multiple quests are chained together to tell a bigger story. By solving quests and defeating NPCs, player characters receive experience points. Upon receiving enough experience points the player character will advance to the next level, raising its attributes making it stronger. Quest rewards also include improved equipment also increasing player character s strength. After becoming stronger, the player character can go to other areas of the world with stronger NPCs and solve quests and experience the story there. In contrast to offline role-playing games, MMORPGs allow to play together in a group to solve quests and fight monsters together. This group play is often encouraged as defeating the strongest NPCs requires coordinated play by a group of players fulfilling special roles like "tanks" absorbing damage, healers healing wounded players, and damage dealers bringing the enemy monsters down. Virtual worlds also have an in-game economy where goods can be crafted from reagents in the world and items can be traded between players using an in-game currency. The primary purpose of obtaining these items is again to become stronger. However, some players also enjoy getting rich by crafting, buying, and selling items. Richard Bartle developed a typology of players classifying them according to their motivation for playing an MMORPG [9]. According to him, there are achievers, explorers, socializers, and killers. Achievers primarily focus on advancing their player characters, becoming more powerful, richer, or obtaining the best equipment. Explorers concentrate on exploring the world, experiencing the quests and the entire content that is available. Socializers primarily enjoy playing together with friends and the social interaction among players. Finally, killers enjoy playing the role of a bad guy killing other players and disrupting their game experience.

18 12 Chapter 2 Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments Yee [128] argues this taxonomy of types is too strict as there could be multiple overlapping motivating factors. He conducted a survey among 3000 players asking them for their motivation. Afterwards he classified the motivation into the three main factors achievement, social, and immersion. They were divided into several subfactors. For example, the achievement factor is divided further into advancement, mechanics, and competition. Players focusing on advancement again enjoy increasing level and strength of their player characters to show off their status to others. Players focusing on mechanics have fun analysing the game rules to maximize their strength becoming the most skilful players. Finally, players who like competition especially enjoy defeating other players in fights or dominating the economy of the world. Advancement and competition were among the most important factors mentioned by players. If competition and showing off the obtained status is that important to many players, it is absolutely crucial the competition is fair. The rules should be the same for all players. If some players are able to cheat and break the rules, honest players enjoying the competition will simply quit playing the game as they cannot win an unfair competition. This endangers the success of the virtual world. Thus, operators have to make sure cheating is not possible The Operator Perspective Developing and running a virtual world causes considerable costs for the operator. As of 2003, the average costs for development were estimated to be $7 million with $10 to $12 million being common [95]. Lately, the development cost of the MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic [39] were estimated to be the highest ever totalling $150-$200 million [96]. The main reasons for these high costs compared to developing traditional offline games are twofold. First, a huge amount of content has to be created for the virtual world. For offline games, it is appropriate to offer 20 hours of entertainment until the game is played through. MMORPGs are designed to be played continuously. Every time a player enters the world, he needs something to accomplish. With many players in the world, the world has to be big to accommodate all the players and provide a variety of activities to choose from. Creating content like quests and 3D models for world objects requires considerably bigger effort compared to offline games. Second, designing and implementing the technical architecture for an MMORPGs is much more challenging. Currently, it consists of servers running the virtual world

19 2.1 Characterization 13 simulation and clients visualizing the world and allowing player interaction. Even with this centralized architecture, an MMORPG is a distributed system and developers have to face all the additional difficulties like partial failure and message loss. Still, the virtual world should always be available, run reliably, and it should be scalable so game interaction runs smooth even with a massive number of players. If player progress is lost, the world is not available, or interaction suffers from message delay or inconsistencies, players will be disappointed and quit eventually. In addition to the initial development costs, launching the games requires investments into server infrastructure and marketing. Afterwards, there are costs for running the virtual world, estimated to be as high as $3-$5 million per year [95] These include further developing and maintaining the world and adding new content but also staff costs for player support and community management. Finally, the energy and bandwidth consumed by servers and any additional maintenance costs have to be paid as well. A commercial operator of a virtual world expects revenues to make up for the running costs, to pay off the initial investments, and to generate a profit. The classical subscription-based model requires the player to first buy the game for a price comparable to offline games, covering a considerable part of the development costs but not generating a profit on its own [95]. Typically, 30 days of play time is already included. Afterwards, players have to subscribe by paying a fee to continue playing. This fee usually ranges from $10 to $15 per month, depending on the game and the subscription interval. World of Warcraft employs this subscription model generating a large stream of revenues with its 10 million subscribers as of Lately, the so-called free-to-play model has been applied successfully by MMORPGs like Lord of the Rings Online [116]. With this model, downloading the game client, creating an account, and playing the game is free of charge. However, after the player started playing and advanced its character some levels, the game will begin to charge the player for making additional content available. For example, higherlevel regions of the world will not contain any quest givers and unlocking them has to be paid for first. There is an in-game shop where players can buy these quest packs or a wide variety of items to increase the advancement speed or make playing the game more convenient. More character slots to create more player characters than the initially allowed number can also be bought. The operator assumes once a player started playing the game and got attracted to it, he will pay to continue playing. Even if he does not, he is still available to play in groups or build social connections with others

20 14 Chapter 2 Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments who in turn pay to play. Considering the fact that Lord of the Rings Online runs on this model for quite some time and a lot of other MMORPGs have changed to this model lately, it seems to be quite successful. The third model called pay-to-play is a hybrid between the two former models, requiring the player to pay for the game initially but no subscription is necessary. Guild Wars [3] and Guild Wars 2 [4] are examples for this kind of model. Guild Wars 2 also features an in-game shop generating running revenues. No matter what model is used, having more players will generate more revenues. The major part of the costs is fixed like the development costs or staff costs for game maintenance and support. It does not make difference in cost whether a development team enhances the world to keep it interesting for or 1 million players as they create the same content for every player. Some staff costs like support or community management might vary with player numbers. Bandwidth costs are probably the only costs that directly scale with the number of players. Therefore, a commercial game operator will always try to attract as many players as possible. When fixed costs are covered, every additional player generates a profit margin. Thus, operators are naturally interested in keeping the virtual world cheat-free so players stay attracted to it Terminology A lot of terms have been used to describe what is essentially a virtual world: distributed virtual environment (DVE), networked virtual environment (NVE), massively multiuser virtual environment (MMVE), massively multiuser online game (MMOG), or massively multiuser online role-playing game (MMORPG). Each of these terms stress different aspects, for example DVEs and NVEs are used do describe systems with smaller user numbers while all M*-terms include these massive user numbers. The term MMVE we use is more neutral towards potential uses of virtual worlds, also allowing systems like collaborative workspaces. In fact, MMORPGs like World of Warcraft with their 3D representation and their fast-paced fighting interaction in a fantasy game world are the main motivating and as of today only existing applications. Therefore, a user is a player and we will use the terms MMVE and MMORPG quite interchangeably. There is a clear distinction between the terms player, player character, and node or peer of a player. A player is the user in front of the computer controlling the actions of his player character in the virtual world. A node or peer is the process on the

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